The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design (27 page)

Our office has a paper-towel dispenser in the kitchen. It holds a roll of blue paper towels, and towels are pulled from the center of the roll through a hole in the bottom of the dispenser. It is also refilled from the bottom. Press a catch and the base swings open, then a roll is shoved in, and the base is closed again. To prevent the roll from falling out before the base is closed, the dispenser is fitted with a “non-return device”—a set of plastic flaps that hinge up but not down.

Bill was bored. Computer programming wasn’t sufficient exercise for his vivid imagination. He wandered into the kitchen to make some tea, and as he waited for the kettle to boil, his eye fell upon the towel dispenser. The cleaners had failed to refill it and it was empty, with its base hanging open.

Terminally bored, Bill felt a sudden urge to see what it looked like from the inside.

To his delight, his head fitted into the dispenser fairly well. He was not a particularly tall man, and the unit was mounted high on the wall, so he stood high on his tiptoes for a better view. That was just the right height. The non-return device “non-returned” right under his chin!

How long can one stand on one’s tiptoes? Not very long, according to Bill’s colleagues, who were attracted by the thrashing, choking noises coming from the kitchen. They found Bill dangling by the throat from a paper towel dispenser!

Fortunately, they were able to release him without permanent damage. It was quite entertaining to watch. I do wonder, however, what an inquest would have made of the situation if he
had
strangled himself.

And I wish I’d had a camera.

Reference: Personal Account

 

The perpetrator says, “OK, it was a daft idea, but hey, at least I know what the interior looks like. It was worth it.”

 

 

 

R
EADER
C
OMMENT
:

 

“I’ll stick to photocopying my bum at work.”

 

 

My cousin is a paramedic who related the following story to me. “Sparky” is a twenty-eight-year-old brand-spanking-new paramedic student. Today was his first day in the medic lab, and he marked this occasion by taking the defibrillator paddles, placing them on his chest and shouting, “Juice me up!”

Ding Dong Paramedic Student number two took him at his word, charging up the paddles and shocking Sparky at 360 joules. Sparky took all of six steps before collapsing and going into full cardiac arrest. His fellow classmates began CPR until the real paramedics arrived three minutes later. They defibrillated Sparky once again at 360 J, converting him into a normal sinus rhythm and saving his life. He was intubated, given one round of epi [epinephrin] and brought as a post-code to the emergency room where I work. With the hopes that Sparky did not sustain any brain damage from hypoxia, or ischemia to his heart, he should have a full recovery. I worked on Sparky for four hours tonight, eventually taking him to intensive care just before I left.

Sparky currently is a volunteer firefighter with aspirations of being hired as a paramedic/firefighter. In true EMS spirit, he has been given the new nicknames AC/DC and Joules, although his career in EMS is uncertain. He broke two golden rules:

• 1) If you don’t know what it is, don’t touch it.
  
• 2) If you know what it is, don’t kill anyone with it.
  

The student that charged the defibrillator stayed after class to write, “I will not electrocute my classmates” one hundred times on the board.

Thank God for paramedics. And God, please protect children, fools, and paramedic students.

Reference: Personal Account

There’s something seriously wrong with the universe!

To end the book, let us turn from the demise of the individual to the demise of the entire universe. Will it be Heat Death, the Big Crunch, or the Big Rip?

Stephen Darksyde, Science Writer

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, a young star was paying the price for a life led too fast and too furious. The mighty sun had ripped through her precious store of hydrogen and briefly worked through the heavier elements until her nuclear furnace went dry; then she blew her starry guts out. The light of her destruction, now part funeral pyre and part grave marker, would thread its way past stellar nurseries and gaudy nebulae for over a hundred thousand years, until a small portion fell on the alien shores of a distant, blue-green planet circling a modest yellow star. There it would come to the attention of a recently evolved denizen that walked on two legs, known by the name of Colin Henshaw.

Prior to the day that violent supernova appeared in the sky, many mysteries of space and time were wrapped up in a pretty box called the Hot Inflationary Big Bang Model. The Big Bang explained why our cosmos is expanding; the Hot Inflationary Model covered how ripples of matter and energy arose in the infant universe to form the first galaxies and stars.

The looming question remaining in cosmology was how fast the universe is expanding, and whether it will end in fire or ice. If the mass of the universe is below a critical magnitude, it will keep expanding forever, and our cosmos will end in Heat Death: a perpetual state of utter black emptiness and cold. The background temperature will gradually approach absolute zero and such will be the fate of the cosmos to the grim end of time. If the mass of the universe is above that critical magnitude, one day it will stop expanding and slowly begin to contract. As the universe collapses, it will grow hotter and denser until time itself ends, and everything is contained in a single point known as a singularity: the Big Crunch. Both pictures are simple and compelling—and, as it turns out, wrong.

In the 1980s, cosmologists measured the universe’s rate of expansion to a higher degree of accuracy than ever before. When they extrapolated the rate backward in time they ran into one hell of a paradox: The universe was younger than the oldest stars within it! It would be another decade before science would began to unravel this unwelcome twist. To understand how astronomers eventually made the biggest discovery since the Big Bang itself, let’s return to that supernova.

On a balmy South African evening in 1987, our amateur astronomer noticed a tiny brilliant point in the Large Magellanic Cloud; one of two puffs of stars hanging high above the blazing disk of our own Milky Way galaxy. It hadn’t been there before.
He called up a few observatories and asked them to check it out, certain that the professionals were already aware of the oddity. In that, he was wrong. Within hours of his report, though, every major observatory on Earth locked onto that region in the sky, to witness one of the most beautiful and destructive shows nature can put on. Supernova 1987A had arrived, the nearest to earth in a millennium.

Its legacy would shake the scientific community to its core.

One immediate benefit was that SN1987A demolished Young Earth Creationism, a belief that the universe was created only six thousand to ten thousand years ago. As seen with the eye of the mighty Hubble Space Telescope, the remnant of SN1987A is a single bright dot, surrounded by double offset rings of incandescent debris and a smaller primary ring centered on the core of what had once been the star. Because the apparent width of the ring can be measured, and because the actual diameter can be obtained using basic astrophysics, astronomers can directly calculate the distance to the supernova using simple trigonometry. That distance is 168,000 light-years. And scientists can categorically state that the light from SN1987A has not changed velocity during the transit. The conclusion is straightforward: She blew up 168,000 years ago, or about 160,000 years before Young Earth Creationists claim the universe existed.

But a more significant legacy of SN1987A would leave astronomers picking their collective jaw up off the floor. Observations of SN1987A led cosmologists to a new standard candle (an astronomical object with a known luminosity used to calculate distance) in a certain type of stellar remnant. The new technique allowed them to measure with unprecedented accuracy how fast galaxies are separating from one another. The results were astounding.

After meticulous observation to measure how fast the expansion of the universe was slowing down, the stunning conclusion was that the rate wasn’t decreasing at all. The universe was expanding all right, but the rate of expansion was
increasing
. The universe was accelerating outward! The key to making the equations balance was a mysterious force dubbed “dark energy,” which accounts for more than two-thirds of the mass of the entire cosmos. What we think of as “the universe”—stars, planets, light, atoms, and energy—is but a light frothing of what physicists call baryonic matter floating in an invisible sea of dark energy. And since this mysterious force is increasing in magnitude, if unchecked it will grow and grow, until galaxies, stars, planets, atoms, and even black holes are torn asunder: The Big Bang will end in the Big Rip!

Which brings us back to the puzzle of the universe being younger than the oldest stars within it. The formerly accepted estimate for the age of the universe was based on the false assumption that the expansion was slowing down. That age is a bit less than the new figure arrived at by assuming the rate of expansion is increasing. This explains the discrepancy between the age of the universe and the oldest stars within it. And although astronomers and physicists are now at an absolute loss to explain dark energy, at least the conundrum of old stars in a younger universe is cleared up.

Serendipity is waiting to strike again: The tantalizing clues into the nature of the dark-energy phenomena hint that, once resolved, the results will be as significant as when Isaac Newton was conked on the head with an apple.

References: Fact-checked with Dr. Sean Carroll, Assistant Professor of Physics, University of Chicago

W
EBSITE
B
IOGRAPHY

The Darwin Awards archive was born on a Stanford University webserver in 1994. Its cynical view of the human species made it a favorite speaker in classrooms, offices, and pubs around the world. News of the website spread by word of mouth, and submissions flew in from far and wide. As the archive grew, so did its acclaim.

The website matriculated to its own domain in 1997, won dozens of Internet awards, and now ranks among the top 3,000 most-visited websites. It currently entertains half a million visitors per month in its comfortable Silicon Valley home. Guests are welcome to set off fireworks and play on the trampoline.

www.DarwinAwards.com is the locus for official Darwin Awards and related tales of misadventure. New accounts of terminal stupidity appear daily in the public Slush Pile. Visitors can vote on stories, sign up for a free email newsletter, and share their opinions on the Philosophy Forum—a community of free thinkers who enjoy numerous philosophical, political, and scientific conversations.

Some stories in this book include a URL directing you to a webpage with more information. All the hyperlinks can be explored starting from this portal:

www.DarwinAwards.com/book

A
UTHOR
B
IOGRAPHIES

Wendy Northcutt studied molecular biology at Berkeley, worked in a neuroscience research laboratory at Stanford, and later joined a biotech startup developing treatments for cancer and diabetes. She wrote the Darwin Awards while waiting for her dastardly genetic manipulations to yield results.

Eventually Wendy shrugged aside lab responsibilities in favor of an offbeat career. She now works as a webmaster, and writes both code and prose for the Darwin Awards website. Much of her time is spent wishing she could catch up on work.

In her free time, Wendy chases eclipses, spends time with friends, and inhabits an increasingly eccentric wardrobe. Interests include reading, cooking, cats, gardening, and glassblowing. The vagaries of human behaviour continue to intrigue her.

Christopher M. Kelly is a writer and gifted Renaissance man. He graduated from Stanford University, worked at Apple Computer in Cupertino, and wrote a forthcoming biography about the man who invented the multivitamin, as well as the cult humor book
It’s Okay to Be Happy,
in an attempt to cheer up a depressed girlfriend. Chris now lives in his hometown of Spokane, where he can be found scribbling in coffee shops, and participating in the Entrepreneurs Forum of the Great
Northwest (www.efgn.org). His current project is turning Spokane into an entrepreneurial Mecca.

Chris is in danger of winning a Darwin Award. He needs a muse and a mate. Chris seeks an attractive, intelligent, and kind woman to be his partner, his inspiration, and the mother of his offspring. Chris deserves to remain in the gene pool. Please don’t let Chris’s genes die out!

www.DarwinAwards.com/book/chris.html

B
IOGRAPHIES OF
C
ONTRIBUTORS

Annaliese Beery is a graduate student in neuroscience. Annaliese loves the entire field of biology, from molecular genetics to ecology. She spent several years teaching high school students AP biology, chemistry, computer science, and AP environmental science. While it’s hard to beat summers off for field studies and outdoor adventures, Annaliese pried herself away from teaching and began her Ph.D. program a few years ago. She still collects biology stories of all kinds.

Annaliese contributed two essays:

“Love Bites,” page 90.

“The Skinny on Fat,” page 250.